AN (6/8/2023): This story, as the summary says, is co-written by me and Myst66 (special thanks to him!) based on my original concept! This was originally published yesterday on AO3, but I figured that I might as well share this here. We hope you enjoy reading our story, so for now here is "A Picture-Perfect Photocopy!"
By the way, this is a reupload. Apparently a site error took the original out "temporarily", but I didn't want to wait and let its momentum get robbed.
"You wanna be a hero?! Then play the part and die like every other Huntsman in history!"
Roman's words cut through the piercing winds on the airship surface as he let loose yet another hefty swing, sending the little red nuisance in front of him flying backwards; the thunk of the impact nearly drowned out by the cries of a few Griffons flying above.
"As for me, I'll do what I do best..." Roman started to advance forward, a smile forming on his face as he prepared to continue his assault.
"Lie, steal, cheat... and survive!"
Roman ripped off an overhead swing towards—
. . .
—a gobsmacked Neo, who reflexively took a step back, barely out of Melodic Cudgel's reach. The intense gusts of wind no longer blew; they had dissipated in an instant. Adding to Roman's confusion, he stood not on the metallic surface of the stolen airship, but on rocky, purple ground. It was also raining; a green lightning bolt struck far away.
"How's that for…" Roman's words trailed off as Neo stood in place with Hush hesitantly pointed towards him. "a… life… Neo?"
Neo only trembled in place. Roman slowly withdrew Melodic Cudgel and raised his hand, taking a single step backwards. The two stared wordlessly at each other, and Roman didn't know what to think. On one hand, it was fortunate to see that she was still alive. On the other hand, nothing else made sense. How was Neo here when she was just launched off the airship? How'd he end up here, a place he'd never seen before? Why was that thunderbolt green?
Why was she wearing the exact same hat, feather and all, that she had gifted him all those years back?
"Is that my hat?"
Before Roman could say anything more, a cloud of tiny pink-white cubes clouded his vision. When they cleared, Neo seemed half a foot taller.
"Hey, hey, hey, no need to panic!" Roman said before his eyes widened. He looked at his hands in utter confusion: Melodic Cudgel had vanished out of his hand, replaced by a pair of leather fingerless gloves. More distressingly, his voice sounded about an octave and a half higher... exactly like a certain red twerp he'd been attacking not even a whole minute ago.
"...What?!"
The cloud of cubes obscured his sight again. Neo was now shorter than her normal height, and Roman couldn't feel his legs. He stood still, barely able to gather his thoughts before the cubes appeared once more, leaving Neo even shorter and Roman unable to feel either of his arms—much less the entire right half of his body.
The sudden shifts gave Roman a slight idea as to what was happening.
"Will you—stop that? Please?" Halfway through his sentence his voice changed pitch again, and he now felt both a strange weight and an uncomfortable set of bronze armor on his chest. He again looked towards Neo, who at this point was bent down on her knees, clearly at the verge of hyperventilation. After a moment, the pink-white cubes flew over his eyes once more.
"Thank you," Roman said, noticing his voice and her height had returned to normal. However, something was wrong: when he blinked, Neo stood right in front of him with just a hint of tension, her panic completely gone. In the second or so that it took him to revert back to his normal self, Neo shouldn't have been able to recover so quickly. Roman resigned himself to wait for an explanation later: there were more important questions to be asked, such as…
"What was the last thing you saw of me?"
. . .
Neo wasn't sure how to respond. How was she supposed to explain multiple years' worth of events without saying a word? Well, one question at a time. She started by conjuring up a small-scale model of the Atlesian airship they had hijacked during the Fall of Beacon.
"Ah, the airship. Y'know, Neo, it feels like that just happened yesterday." Neo ignored Roman's typically smug comment as she spawned a trio of similarly small figures, two of them standing near the edge of the ship's surface; one of them wore a red-rimmed bowler hat, the other's hair was half brown, half pink. The third dangled perilously from the side, red cloak flapping in the heavy wind. She turned her head towards him and silently motioned for him to watch. He nodded.
The figure in the red cloak lunged for the brown-and-pink-haired figure's folded parasol and pressed its faintly red button, causing it to unfold and catch the intense gusts of wind, sending her flying off into the distance. In the corner of her eye, Roman nodded along to the display as the figure of him shouted for his own Neo.
The moment the red-cloaked figure vaulted back onto the airship, scythe in hand, a frown appeared on Roman's face.
"Neo, I'm pretty confident that that's not what happened," Roman remarked.
Neo tilted her head. How, and if so why, did he say that? In all fairness, she couldn't have possibly seen everything; after all, she had been launched off the airship before whatever had transpired next, but the fact that Ruby came out of the altercation alive while Roman didn't told her all she needed to know.
Turning her attention back to the illusion, the two figures continued to fight. Cane and scythe clashed repeatedly until a deft strike sent the figure Roman's weapon flying overboard. A followup swing viciously slammed into his side, the blow hard enough to send him tumbling off the side of the ship. Before anything else could happen, though, a swift blow from the actual Melodic Cudgel shattered the illusion.
Neo switched her attention to Roman, who withdrew his cane with a mostly confused expression. "Look, Neo, as much as I love your attempt to put the entire Valean animation industry out of a job, the script has some serious issues," he started to explain. "Yes, while little Red did recover after sending you flying away, she didn't grab her scythe." The statement confused Neo. How could Ruby have ended Roman's life without her scythe? It just didn't add up.
Roman continued talking. "She charged me, but she's nothing without that glorified wheat harvester of hers. Seriously, Neo, I had such an advantage that I launched into Monologue no. 6 in the middle of the beatdown! I was just getting to the good part when—" Roman abruptly broke off, his increasingly animated face almost immediately replaced by a blank stare. Neo looked at him quizzically, but his focus seemed a long way off.
. . .
I'm dead?! Roman thought, his eyes rapidly darting from side to side, taking in his surroundings with renewed understanding. No wonder everything and everyone looks so different: I'm a dead man walking! Is this… the future? Some kind of twisted afterlife?
Roman took a shaky step back, and then another. Surely, this couldn't be real; surely, he couldn't have died back on that airship; surely, everything was alright and Neo didn't have to live without him...
Right?
The sight of his precious bowler hat on Neo's head shattered those frail assumptions.
I'm dead. In an unusual display of panic, Roman placed the palm of his gloved hand on his beating heart as he lost his balance, tipping backward. Roman noticed Neo lunging forward in an attempt to catch his fall, but her effort was too late; he fell.
Neo went around Roman to his left and pointed her fingers towards her mouth, beginning to mimic deep breathing. Roman barely got the gist of her language, but followed along. At first, it had no effect. However, as he continued to take deep, slow breaths, his muscles loosened, and his heart rate returned to how it usually was.
At last, he could think clearly again. Even with this revelation, he still had plenty of questions, but one was far more important than the others.
"N—Neo, how long has it been?" Roman asked, prompt but shaken.
Neo pulled up her Scroll and typed a few letters into it before showing Roman what she had written. "1 year."
Roman groaned. "And are you sure I'm not dead?"
The moment he asked Neo that question, she turned her head to the side, eyes fluttering and brows raised. He could tell right away that she was confused; no surprise considering no sane person could instantly process bringing a dead person back to life—memories, consciousness, and all—by complete accident.
She simply nodded, her face betraying her internal contemplation of the situation; Roman could tell that she was lost in her own thoughts. Well, he wondered rhetorically, wasn't that a grim thing to ask.
And then Neo fainted, unceremoniously collapsing onto the rocky ground.
Eeeeyup. Roman took a quick look at her unconscious body. Gone were the cropped pink-and-white blazer jacket, brown corset, and brown leather pants; in were a white vest, joined by a brown jacket with pink lining and two overall-esque shoulder straps and a pair of white pants. Her heeled boots were pared down to her ankles, the heels themselves also shortened upon closer inspection.
But the most important thing was that it was still her.
Roman took a deep breath. He couldn't even begin to imagine what Neo had gone through in the year he missed, and he wasn't in the mood to think about what she'd done to wind up in this strange land anyway. Its complete lack of cover made Roman feel exposed; they weren't exactly the most inconspicuous duo at the moment. Roman started to look for a place to take shelter. The light rain cut down on visibility, but he could make out the silhouette of a tree line in the distance.
His mind made up, Roman bent down and hoisted Neo onto his shoulders. Fortunately, she was just as light on his back as she was on her feet. With his internal whirlwind of confusion and fear finally calmed, he set off towards the forest.
. . .
Neo's eyes fluttered open.
The first thing she noticed was the ground. The purple-black rocks and debris were no more; in their stead was a mostly grassy surface lined with paths of light dirt, disturbed by freshly created footprints.
It was only then she realized she was being carried through a forest by Roman.
The sky was a pale orange. Strange structures resembling palm trees surrounded the two as birds chipped, ocean waves washed against the sand from afar, and Roman's shoes stepped across hard, pale soil and green grasses alike. As she looked, she caught a glimpse of brightly-colored flora, the likes of which she had never seen before in her life.
Pretty as it was, the strange yet beautiful scenery only distracted Neo for a moment before the weight of reality came crashing back down on her. It was a lot to process: in the last 48 hours, she had fallen through a mysterious void, landed on an island that occasionally defied the laws of reality, and brutally killed an incredibly strange beast by summoning several clones of herself that could both act independently and still follow her orders.
And to top it all off, her long-gone partner was back from the dead by her own hand, somehow.
To ask herself what he's doing here a year after his untimely passing would imply she could process what was going on. He had died back in the Fall of Beacon, and even he came to that realization. It wasn't just him going into hiding; he had missed everything from the rest of the Fall of Beacon to the Battle of Haven up to the Fall of Atlas. His body was never found.
Yet here he was.
As soon as Roman set her down on a rock, her first instinct was to pinch herself to see if she was dreaming. She was in an alien world, exposed to an alien situation that could only exist in a schlocky movie.
She felt the pinch. She wasn't.
Her next instinct was to pinch Roman. Armed with the idea that he was the one dreaming and wasn't just bird food, she stood up, reached out, and gave the unaware Roman's shoulder a sharp pinch.
Roman instantly collapsed into hundreds of jagged glass shards that vanished into the ether as fast as they had appeared. Neo jolted backwards at the initial shock, then stared at the rapidly disappearing shards in utter disbelief.
Numbness overtook her as reality set in, but it was quickly replaced by all-consuming despair. Why did she look a gift horse in the mouth? Did the universe throw her a single bone amidst all her struggles only to watch her foolishly throw it away so quickly? Did she really end the miraculous second life of the man who meant the world to her and had just carried her to safety before it could even begin with something as innocuous as a pinch?
What was she doing?
With no answers, Neo turned up to the heavens, and, had the brother gods not had the cruelty to deprive her of a voice, would have let out an ear-piercing wail that would have sent every bird in the forest flying away from their trees. As it was, however, she was left to grieve in silence. Tears started to well around her eyes and flow down her face, wetting the ground beneath her quivering legs. Neo continued to cry, convinced that the world had finally abandoned her.
At least, she was until she felt a familiar gloved hand on her shoulder.
"Neo? Is everything–" Roman didn't have a chance to say anything more before Neo leapt into his arms, her tears of sorrow partially replaced by those of joy. He reflexively caught her as she tucked her head into his shoulder, dampening his suit. Through her tears, Neo could see a hint of a smile form on Roman's face. He gave her a few slow, gentle pats on her back. "Don't fret, Neo," Roman reassured,
"I'm all right."